The ICESCR certainly constitutes the central universal human rights regime focusing on ESC rights. Yet this is not to say that the Covenant would be the sole human rights treaty specifically concerned with ESC rights, their progressive realisation, and the avoidance of retrogressive developments. The following sections seek to contrast the ICESCR model with approaches to ESC rights that have emerged in regional settings. This chapter thus addresses the (Revised) European Social Charter as the primary ESC rights instrument in the European context (Section I.). In the Inter-American human rights system, the protection for ESC rights is particularly complex and extends to a ‘classical’ human rights treaty, a formally non-binding declaration, and a specialised Protocol (Section II.). The African human rights system, finally, offers some particularly innovative developments in the ESC rights context (Section III.). Just like the preceding Chapter 2, this chapter again builds on the basic tripartite structure that was suggested in the Introduction, which focuses on the respective institutional framework of each human rights regime, their substance (notably with a view to progressive realisation and non-regression), and their supervisory procedures.

THE EUROPEAN SOCIAL CHARTER: ENSURING HUMAN RIGHTS THAT ARE ‘EXCEPTIONALLY COMPLEX AND PARTICULARLY EXPENSIVE’

As on the universal level with the two UN Covenants, the human rights protection system established in the context of the Council of Europe (‘CoE’) includes an instrument that primarily focuses on civil and political rights, namely the European Convention on Human Rights (‘ECHR’), and a sister agreement that expressly focuses on ESC rights, namely the 1961 European Social Charter (‘EurSC’ or ‘Social Charter’). Just like in the UN context, it is a deplorable yet recurring theme that the more ‘classical’ human rights treaty (the ECHR) has enjoyed considerably more public and scholarly attention than its social rights counterpart. While the original EurSC suffered from a number of structural and perhaps also substantive weaknesses, it underwent a considerable refashioning or ‘revitalisation’ since the late 1980s. The Charter has been supplemented by a Protocol that added additional rights (‘1988 Protocol’) and another Protocol (‘1991 Protocol’ or ‘Turin Protocol’) that revised the supervisory mechanism. A third Protocol established a novel collective complaint procedure (‘1995 Protocol’).